Welcome to the Consumerist Archives

Thanks for visiting Consumerist.com. As of October 2017, Consumerist is no longer producing new content, but feel free to browse through our archives. Here you can find 12 years worth of articles on everything from how to avoid dodgy scams to writing an effective complaint letter. Check out some of our greatest hits below, explore the categories listed on the left-hand side of the page, or head to CR.org for ratings, reviews, and consumer news.

This Thursday, ICANN will vote on next fiscal year’s budget, and included in that is a provision to charge 20 cents per registration for domain names that are deleted during the grace period. There will still be a refundable grace period, but if the “level of deletions exceeds 10 percent of a registrar’s net new registrations in that month,” the fee kicks in—in effect, making front running uneconomical. Network Solutions is urging ICANN to approve it, and has said that it will stop pre-registering domains if the provision is approved.

On their official announcement page, Network Solutions writes,

If ICANN adopts the anti-tasting provision, Network Solutions will feel safe in discontinuing its service. Implementing a non-refundable fee during the AGP will deflate domain tasters’ profits and provide a substantial blow to front runners who use and sell search data for tasting purposes. While we understand and appreciate certain concerns initially raised about our protection measure and the way it was implemented, we are heartened by the fact that we successfully highlighted the issue and assisted in moving toward the eradication of these negative practices.

Of course, they also profited nicely from subsequent registrations due to their policy—it wasn’t simply an act of good citizenship. We also assume this means that pre-registering searched domains will no longer be profitable to Network Solutions—in other words, the policy will be discontinued mainly for economic reasons.

In a related discussion on Slashdot, solprovider points out that ICANN’s new policy may also put an end to what Network Solutions describes as “domain kiting,” where several (possibly related) companies keep passing domain registrations from one to the next by taking advantage of the free grace period, effectively preventing the domains from ever being available to the public. Solprovider points out that domain kiters may simply purchase the domains if the numbers make sense financially.

We’ll have to wait and see whether millions of trapped domain names become avaible in the near future—or if they’ll simply be registered for real by these companies.